Slow adoption rates: sad or not?

Chapter 1: The changing face of C# development: 1.2.3

Created: 1/22/2008
Last updated: 1/22/2008

When discussing C# 2 and .NET 2.0, I expressed regret that they have taken so long to become widely adopted in the industry. I was reminded that the industry exists to make a profit, not to have fun with technology. New technology often (if not always) involves an element of risk, and there's definitely a lot of sense in sitting back while the early adopters take the risks.

I'm sticking by my use of the word "sad" though - because that hesitation to use .NET 2.0 has left many of us developers "in the trenches" being forced to use .NET 1.1 and C# 1 despite the huge productivity gains available with the later technologies. It's sad for us.

I really, really hope that the multi-targeting feature of Visual Studio 2008 along with the smaller conversion process and lack of a new runtime will mean many of us get to use the updated IDE and language features much earlier than we did last time round - the risk is much lower this time.